Adventures in genealogy

Convergence of Genealogical Topics

I haven’t posted too much this past week, but I seem to have a convergence of topics from previous posts. First, the 40th Carnival of Genealogy‘s topic was finding living relatives. This week, I received a response from my mother’s second cousin. He invited us to dinner, which is similar to the topic for the 41st COG — although, if any deceased relatives were present, they fortunately failed to materialize before us! I was hoping to find out a birthdate for this cousin’s grandmother, who is one of the Pater girls I mentioned in my Polish Name Days post, to confirm my theory that her birthday is most likely on or near a feast day for the saint she is named after. But in all the excitement of meeting and looking at family photos, I forgot to ask. So, more on that topic later.

Later in the week I received a response from the Polish National Archives with information on my great-grandfather Jan Piontkowski, confirming some of what I learned from his naturalization papers. I was hoping to write more about that – until I realized that the record is in Russian, and my experience to date is with Polish birth records. So, I’ll need a little more time to decipher it or I’ll have to ask someone with more experience for help. The information I refer to that was confirmed is the date of birth of my grandfather’s brother. And because names in these Russian documents are fortunately written in Polish in parentheses after the Russian name, I have a confirmation of my great-grandmother’s last name. Actually, I guess you could say that this deals with the Russian Partition of Poland and where my ancestors were in 1808 and 1908 … At this rate, I won’t have any new topics to add and I’ve only been blogging for a month!